Should have known: Media magnate Rupert Murdoch and his wife, Wendi Deng, who recently agreed on a divorce settlement, arrive for the official opening of Fox Studios Australia in Sydney in November 1999. | AFP-JIJI

Study tracks 'automatic attitudes,' marital success over the years

A new study by psychologists found that newlyweds had underlying positive or negative gut feelings about their spouses that many are unaware of and that predicted their level of marital satisfaction years later.

The experiment used a photo of the newlywed spouse and a series of positive and negative words to elicit “automatic attitudes” — unfiltered, knee-jerk reactions that can sometimes oppose conscious thoughts.

“Either people are completely unaware of this automatic attitude, or they’re completely aware and just not willing to talk about it,” said psychologist and study author James McNulty of Florida State University. The study was published online Thursday in the journal Science.

McNulty, who primarily conducts research on romantic relationships, showed a newlywed the photo of his or her spouse for just a third of a second, followed by a word that was positive or negative: “delightful” or “disgusting,” for instance.

The newlywed, as fast as possible, had to push a button indicating the word was good or bad.

Psychologists say that witnessing the photo for just long enough to recognize who you are looking at, but not enough to study the detail of the picture, causes your brain to automatically retrieve from memory any associations you have with it. This facilitates a speedier response to any words that match those associations.

So, for example, a newlywed who pushed the button for a negative word faster than for a positive word after the photo of the new spouse flashed past was indicating an automatic attitude that was negative.

McNulty and his colleagues tested for automatic attitudes with 135 heterosexual couples who had been married in the previous six months. They filled out a questionnaire asking them about marital satisfaction. Unsurprisingly, the newlyweds’ marriage evaluations had a decidedly rosy outlook. At six-month intervals for the next four years, each partner re-evaluated his or her feelings about the marriage using the same questionnaire.

As time passed and their honeymoon phases waned, the initial automatic attitudes gradually started to match up with their reported happiness or unhappiness.

Twelve of the couples even divorced within the four years of the study, said McNulty.

So, are some people just in denial about their unhappiness, or are they completely unaware of these feelings to begin with?

McNulty said there is pressure for newlyweds to seem ecstatic: “They just got married, spent thousands of dollars on their wedding, and committed to one another in public. They better be happy!”

But since later they are able to admit their less than stellar opinions of the partnership, it suggests that certain people just might not realize their deep feelings. But there is no fooling an automatic attitude test.

“People can’t fake it. They don’t even know what it’s measuring,” he said.

Clinical psychologist Gregory Kulman of Brooklyn College believes the study needs to ask more specific questions in order to find a link between conscious and automatic attitudes. “He’s only asking them, ‘Partner good or bad?’ ” said Kulman. “But if you asked about more specific behaviors, you might get a better correlation.”

He and his wife, Patricia Schell Kulman, hold a research-based seminar called Marriage Success Training for couples who are considering marriage, engaged couples and newlyweds. Having a lukewarm gut reaction or cold feet can be normal, he said.

“People are nervous about getting married; that’s a normal response,” Kulman said. “Sometimes gut feelings are misleading because they are just the gut feelings that everybody has.”

Popular belief says that you need to find someone perfectly compatible with you, but he dismisses this as a harmful fallacy that often leads to an uneasy gut. Every couple will have incompatibilities. What matters is how good a couple is at managing them.